(From California Newsreel)
Family Across the Sea is "Roots" - retold as an historical and linguistic detective story. It traces how scholars have uncovered the connection between the Gullah people of South Carolina's Sea Islands and the people of Sierra Leone.
Family Across the Sea demonstrates how AfricanAmericans kept their ties with their homeland over centuries of oppression through their speech, songs and customs. In the 1930s a pioneering black linguist, Lorenzo Turner, discovered over 3000 words of African origin in the Gullah dialect. The film's conclusion, the moving return of a Gullah delegation to Sierra Leone and the African "family" they hadn't realized they had, becomes a homecoming for all African Americans.